Giuliani’s plan for illegal immigration

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani appears to have his immigration stump speech down. On the campaign trail today in Maine, he spoke again about how to curb illegal immigration. According to an AP story:

To stem the tide of illegal immigrants, Giuliani said border patrol officials should use technology — such as nighttime photography and motion detectors along border fences — and statistical analysis of where illegal entry takes place.

To keep better track of immigrants who enter the nation legally, the government should issue tamperproof ID cards, he said.

“If you had all this data and information and used this equipment, we could virtually eliminate illegal immigration,” he said.

Notice a glaring omission there? What about the 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here? No easy answer to that one – especially politically.

As we wrote recently, ICE estimates that it’ll cost $94 billion to deport the nation’s illegal immigrants. And that figure doesn’t even include court costs and the price to round up all these people. So that option seems highly unlikely.

You could try to enforce an enivronment where illegal immigrants don’t feel welcome with the theory that they’ll leave the U.S. Fine landlords who rent to them and employers who hire them, for example. But Rudy was mayor of a city known for providing haven for millions of undocumented workers. So that option might expose him to criticisms of hypocrisy.